All about me.
Just prior to beginning work on his first feature film, 1979’s Real Life, comedian Albert Brooks had been making short subjects for the show that would eventually become known as Saturday Night Live (or, as the bewildered Phoenix city councilman puts it when introducing Brooks in the film, “Good Night Saturday”). …
It is odd to say that the book on writing by a famous writer is a curious beast; there are, after all, so many of them, how odd could they be? But they occupy a very strange niche in the literary world. They’re something akin to a Lifetime Achievement …
The problem with the comedy of humiliation… No, no, let’s start again. That seems dated. Ever since Seinfeld creator Larry David unleashed his… No, that’s predictable. Everybody’s gone there already. Might as well be doing riffs on the American Office. Let’s try one more time. When you’re making a comedy about extremely …
Paul Kingsnorth is the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, a collective of artists and intellectuals who believe that mankind has irretrievably poisoned the environment. They are producing writing, art, and thought informed by the idea that we are living in the last days of human dominance; their ideas are …
Pitchfork, the music website that everybody loves to hate, has just released a list of the alleged 200 best singles of the 1980s. Response on the internet has been, well, response on the internet: discussion of the merits of the songs included is vastly outweighed by outrage at the absence …
Season 2 of True Detective wrapped up this weekend, and internet law dictates we must form an opinion about it as soon as possible, without any pesky reflection or context. It was, to be honest, a bit of a mess; then again, internet law also dictates that we must either scoff …
One of the advantages of making a sports documentary, at least in theory, is that you avoid the pitfall of so many other types of non-fiction film: the lack of footage. If you’re making a movie about a band or a performer, there may be relatively little filmed evidence of …
Great novels — and Philip K. Dick’s unsettling 1962 alternate history The Man in the High Castle is certainly a great novel — tend to have in common the fact that much of their greatness is in their ability to communicate the internal. From their omnipotent viewpoint, they can use …
In a recent review of Ernest Cline’s new novel, Armada — the poorly received follow-up to his hugely successful ’80s geek-culture wallow Ready Player One — io9’s Germain Lussier makes the curious claim that it is “an ultra-nerdy book, but at times, it feels like it doesn’t trust the reader.” Replace …
One never expects an atomic bomb to go off in such a quiet way. It’s also never supposed to be in the form of a long, lovely, exquisitely detailed shaggy dog joke. But Jim Jarmusch’s groundbreaking, entirely wonderful Stranger Than Paradise — which, astonishingly, is 31 years old this month — …
Today is the Fourth of July, the day the United States celebrates its independence and the day we all celebrate a nation founded as an ideal, a project, an attempt at changing the rules by which nations were governed. On the Fourth of July, I have always followed the advice …
Yesterday, we discussed the way streaming media — which has long held out the digital era’s promise of easy access to all filmed entertainment, anytime, anywhere — has in fact led to a balkanization of programming and resulted in a situation where many movies and TV shows are less available …
There is a clip from yesterday’s Daily Show circulating around in which Jon Stewart, devoid of his usual joking manner, laments the Charleston church massacre while dreading that once again, faced with a mass murder, America isn’t going to do anything. And that’s probably right. But the problem isn’t so much …
In yesterday’s review of Wayward Pines, it was noted that the 2015 Grand Champeen of ridiculous TV camp roles is Oscar nominee Terrence Howard. About Howard we know many things: we know, for example, that he loves his own reflection, and does not love women and their dirty, filthy vaginas. We also …
It would be hard to find a director who squandered his early reputation for excellence more quickly and more thoroughly than M. Night Shyamalan. Sunk partly by his own ambition and partly by his adherence to a structure that allowed critics to easily stereotype him as ‘the twist endings guy’, …
